Chris Weitz builds Philip Pullman’s world with real care and then runs through it as if late for something. Dakota Blue Richards and Nicole Kidman are good enough to make you wish the film had slowed down; the bears are the best thing in it.
Chris Weitz writes and directs an adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, the first book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, published in Britain in 1995 and sold in America under the title the film has taken. The novel is long, argumentative and angry about organised religion. The film runs 113 minutes, carries a PG certificate and is anxious not to upset anyone. It is handsomely built and well cast, and it moves through its story at the pace of someone reading the chapter headings aloud.
The world is the part Weitz gets right. Dennis Gassner’s production design gives us an Oxford of brass and amber where airships moor to college towers, and a north that is all ice and black rock. Ruth Myers dresses Nicole Kidman’s Marisa Coulter in cream, gold and fur so that she looks like something expensive left out in the snow. Henry Braham lights the interiors warm and the exteriors bleached. The daemons, the animal souls that walk beside every person, are the best idea on screen. When Mrs Coulter’s golden monkey seizes Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon and the girl folds in pain several yards away, we flinched. The film has told us the rule that a daemon must not be touched, and then it shows us the cost.
Dakota Blue Richards plays Lyra as a liar, a sulker and a quick thinker who knows she is cleverer than the adults. She is not sweet, which is correct. Kidman plays Coulter almost without moving; the smile does the work, and it is the most frightening thing in the film. Daniel Craig’s Lord Asriel is on screen for a few minutes and then gone north, which follows the book but leaves a hole where a leading man was. Freddie Highmore gives Pantalaimon a worried, sensible voice. Ian McKellen’s Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear, has weight: fur that shifts, plate that clanks, a tired dignity in the delivery. When he finally fights another bear we sat up for the first time in half an hour.
Everything else is hurried. Three editors are credited, Anne V. Coates, Kevin Tent and Peter Honess, and the film cuts like a thing that has been through three sets of hands. Characters arrive, say the line that identifies them and leave. Eva Green’s Serafina Pekkala flies down, speaks, flies off. Sam Elliott’s Lee Scoresby turns up with a hat and a balloon as if from a Western playing next door. Jim Carter’s John Faa and Tom Courtenay’s Farder Coram are given a deck to stand on and a speech each. Alexandre Desplat’s score works hard to tell us things the script has not had time to.
The Magisterium is the clearest casualty. In Pullman it is a church; here it is a committee in a grand building, with Christopher Lee as its First High Councilor glowering in a dark room, and nobody ever says what it believes. A children’s film is entitled to soften a book. But a villain with no stated belief is just a man in a hat, and Lyra’s flight loses its point when the thing she is running from has none. The film also stops a chapter or so short of the novel and closes on a promise of more rather than an ending. More did not come.
Weitz is plainly most at ease in the quiet scenes between Lyra and Pan, a girl and her own conscience arguing in a corridor about what to do next, and those are the scenes with a director in them. The scale swallows him.
See it with a child of about ten who has not read the book, and see it for the bears and for Kidman. Readers of the novel will recognise everything and wait for an argument that never arrives. At home it is less painful, because you can pause and explain who everyone is, which the film in a cinema leaves you to work out alone.
